Lisa Duggan wrote a book that explains everything you need to know about Ayn Rand and why she became so enormously consequential so that you don't have to read Rand's work yourself. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed is out now from University of California Press.

Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com

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Dan interviews Mike Davis on what the election reveals about this US political moment and the way forward for the Left.

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Join a Dig book club! Next book is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism thedigradio.com/dig-book-club/

Neoliberalism: we all hate it, but what does it mean? Dan talks to intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian about his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, which tells the story of neoliberalism's Geneva School—including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Wilhelm Röpke—and their vision for a new imperial order establishing rules to protect the market from political interference. It's a movement that begins with nostalgia for the bygone Habsburg Empire, moves on to fights against the decolonized world's efforts to create a New International Economic Order, and that plays a key role in forming the European Economic Community and the WTO.
Live Dig interview in NYC with Yanis Varoufakis on Challenging the New Right-Populism. Saturday December 1, 6pm. The New School's Arnhold Hall at the Theresa Lang Student Center.
Thanks to Verso Books and University of California Press. Check out their titles at www.versobooks.com and ucpress.edu
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Dan interviews Mike Davis about everything we are all suddenly trying to figure out.

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An interview on how the transformation of capitalism has changed the possibilities for anti-capitalist struggle with Michael Hardt, co-author with Antonio Negri of Assembly.

Read Dan's essay on the 20th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle jacobinmag.com/2019/11/seattle-world-trade-organization-protests-socialism

Read Hardt and Negri reflect on the 20th anniversary of Empire newleftreview.org/issues/II120/articles/empire-twenty-years-on

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Dan's lengthy interview with Nick Estes on his remarkable book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. The problem that settler colonialism was repeatedly trying to solve by unleashing such terrific violence—through massacres, by nearly eliminating the buffalo, in reservation confinement, in dominating the Missouri River—was not just indigenous people being in the way but also the existence of a larger relationship between indigenous people and the land, water and animals. The history of resisting this capitalist and colonialist dispossession has endured through the Water Protectors' struggle at Standing Rock—which will, in retrospect, be remembered as a pivotal moment in the global struggle against climate catastrophe.

Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com

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Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much time to arguing that either class or race or gender or whatever matters the most—or worse yet, matters exclusively? And what does "matter more" even mean? Plus, a lengthy Dan Denvir monologue on the identity politics debate on the socialist left.
Thanks to Verso Books. Check out versobooks.com for loads of great left-wing titles.
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Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and The X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men with tinfoil hats decrying the deep state from the heights of power, and the possibilities of stitching socialism and queer politics together into a robust movement for human liberation.
Thank you to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

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What is gentrification? It isn't just about what was once known as the hipster and is still known as the artist, the telltale warning signs of impending demographic change. It's part of an entire political-economic order that has made real estate global capitalism's most prized asset for storing wealth—one that has helped bend place-based urban governments to the will of mobile, and thus more powerful, capital. Dan interviews Samuel Stein on his book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.
Come to The Dig's Slavery's Hinterlands symposium Thursday through Saturday in Rhode Island: facebook.com/events/661508874305008/
Check out the English transcript of last week's Spanish-language interview with Communist Chilean Mayor Daniel Jadue jacobinmag.com/2019/04/communist-party-chile-left-governance-recoleta
Thanks to Verso. Check out their massive left-wing book selection at www.versobooks.com
Please support us with your cash at Patreon.com/TheDig

Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Naomi Schiller on the profound economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela. More than three million refugees and migrants have fled the country. Opposition figure Juan Guaidó has declared himself president. Trump and other right-wing leaders throughout the Americas quickly recognized him as just that. The US imposed new sanctions on Venezuela's oil and has hinted at the possibility of a military invasion. It's unclear what comes next, but foreign intervention would make an extremely bad situation catastrophic.
Meanwhile, many reactionaries throughout the Americas are pointing to Venezuela as proof that socialism cannot work. What is the correct analysis? What does solidarity with the Venezuelan people mean for today's left? These are all extremely complicated and urgent questions. Today, Dan interviews three experts on Venezuela to help answer them.
Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Three interviews: historians Linford Fisher, Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, and Emily Owens.

Dan conducted six interviews on capitalism and slavery at The Dig's recent Slavery's Hinterlands symposium here in Rhode Island. This first of two episodes begins with historian Linford Fisher, who explains that the English settlement of North America was a settler-colonial project that required genocidally dispossessing indigenous people of their lands. What you might not know is that a central tactic for that dispossession, in New England and Virginia alike, was the threat and actual enslavement of native people, including the widespread practice of forcing native youth to labor in English homes. Then historians Christy Clark-Pujara and Joanne Melish, who pick up where Fisher leaves off: slavery wasn't the South's peculiar institution; it was the bedrock of the northern economy. And finally, historian Emily Owens on sexual labor under slavery: what, Owens' work explores, did slavery and freedom mean for women for whom, in brothels or the home, sex was work? On the next episode, Dan has two more interviews looking at the big picture questions of slavery, capitalism, revolution and colonialism, and an interview with a group of public historians who teach about slavery today.

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American liberty has since its foundation relied upon the dispossession of indigenous people and Mexicans, upon African enslavement and, ultimately, upon the constant fleeing outward that created an empire that none dare call by its name. As historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, this expansionist project has finally lost its ideological and material vitality, no longer able to neatly reconcile centuries of mounting contradictions. And so politics returned to the border as American expansion hit a wall—figuratively and, as Trump has demanded, very literally. "Trumpism," Grandin writes, "is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring. There is no 'divine, messianic' crusade that can harness and redirect passions outward. Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy interests, reconcile contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger."
Thanks to University of California Press. Check out No Go WorldL How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics by Ruben Andersson ucpress.edu/book/9780520294608/no-go-world
And thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
Please support this podcast with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

What socialism should offer is freedom by way of power and democratic control over our polity and economy—and thus over our future as a society. Matt Bruenig has one proposal out at his People's Policy Project on how to begin to do just that, and it's called a social wealth fund. The idea is that the state gradually socializes the assets of every single publicly-traded company in the United States by purchasing their stocks.
Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge catalogue of left-wing titles at versobooks.com
Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Marxist economist Grace Blakeley on coronavirus economics.

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Why we need single-payer healthcare, why Medicare for All is suddenly at the center of debate, and why this is all part of a broader struggle for health justice. Dan interviews Tim Faust.

Thanks to Verso. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at Patreon.com/TheDig

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Donna Haraway's work defies disciplines, combining insights from both biology and feminist thought, and drawing on her own involvement in political projects organized around feminism and radical science. Haraway’s most recent book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, takes up these questions as the fragility of earth’s webs of life is becoming frighteningly and increasingly apparent. What are the ethical and political demands in the face of the most pressing threat of our era—catastrophic climate change? To stay with the trouble, Haraway argues, is to reject technofixes that will save us from doom on the one hand, and on the other, to reject the pessimistic idea that “it’s too late” to make the world better. The book outlines a view of what Haraway calls “multispecies flourishing” and the obstacles to achieving it through theoretical insights and speculative fiction imaginings. Interviewed by Jacobin editorial board member Alyssa Battistoni.

Thanks to n+1. To get 25% off a one-year subscription, go to nplusonemag.com/thedig and enter THEDIG at checkout

The documentary Donna Haraway: Story Telling For Earthly Survival is now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo, as well as on DVD via Icarus Films.

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Alyssa's piece on Haraway for n+1: nplusonemag.com/issue-28/reviews/monstrous-duplicated-potent

Sophie Lewis's critique of Haraway and population politics: viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me

The Leap Manifesto: leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto

The Xenofeminist Manifesto: laboriacuboniks.net

Political scientist Jeff Webber discusses the coup against Evo Morales and the recent history of Bolivia.

Read "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Macho Camacho" by Jeff Webber and Forrest Hylton www.versobooks.com/blogs/4493-the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-macho-camacho-jeffery-r-webber-with-forrest-hylton-on-the-coup-in-bolivia

Thanks to University of California Press. Check out their titles at ucpress.edu

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Historian Adam Tooze, the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, explains how crisis in an unprecedentedly powerful and interconnected global banking system coursed through American homes and European sovereign debt markets, exploding into the Tea Party and the European politics of austerity—and, ultimately, leading to today's legitimation crisis of the reigning political establishment and economic order.
Thanks to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
Please support The Dig with your money at patreon.com/TheDig

Dan discusses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Marx's take on revolution and reaction in mid-19th century France, the broader theories he develops about history and the relationship between politics and the class war, and how this all might apply to today—with political sociologist Dylan Riley.
Check out Dan's recent NYT op-ed The Case Against Border Security.
Thanks to NACLA, reporting on the Americas since 1967. Check out their collection of articles on Latin American politics at nacla.org. And thanks, as always, to Verso. Check out their huge collection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com
Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig